Did you know that regular churchgoers are better educated, at least among the young in Europe.?

Question

"Our results show a churchgoing population that is much better educated than could have been imagined, and these differences are more intense among the young than among the old: among the regular churchgoers in their thirties, one out of three is a college graduate, while among those in their thirties in the overall population, only one out of ten is a college graduate."

from a survey taken recently in Venice

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=118062&eng=y

Mass attendance in Italy is declining that's what the survey says. How could that be good for PR?
Please know that the Catholic Church founded the universities, and id not interested to inflate anything.

And the reason no one in the US picked up this data is that you are very self-centred (usually can't even place Europe on a world map) and anti Catholic.

I've got a university exam and a course in statistics.
This is a survey not a study.
I can agree with you on a few points you make, (but I'm still prejudiced against americans.)

JFK should have been excommunicated , and forced to walk by foot to Rome, for his womanizing.

Answer 1

If you are so smart why are you not rich?
erudite answer: "Being rich is not my priority in life."

If you are so smart, why are you not a college graduate?
erudite answer: "Receiving a college diploma has never been a priority in my life."

Discern that, All ye who believe in setting up a strawman fallacy.

Answer 2

Source?

EDIT: So, a study... by the Catholic Church in Venice, says that, their attendance is educated. Assisting is someone from Padua, a Catholic university. The survey involves no offsets for methodology, and relies completely on volunteer responses to paper questionnaires handed out at church. Right.

Shall we begin with methodology of voluntary responses (which always, always, always yields higher education), paper questionnaires (ditto), the nature of the survey (ditto again -- people will know it's a church survey and inflate their responses), or the obvious bias of the people conducting it (ditto, yet again)?

There's a reason no one picked up this data -- it's flawed and obviously the whole thing is a PR exercise in a country with a rapidly falling rate of religiosity.

EDIT 2: I assure you they have an agenda. Church attendance is falling all over the world -- that's the point. It's good PR because it says, "hey, look at us! we're not the uneducated mass you think we are!"

I've taken classes from the University of Chicago, a Catholic school, and I assure you that no Statistics professor there would vet the "study". It's not flawed in any specific way -- there's literally not a single scientific thing about it! Wanna know the best part about it? They compared their congregation with national data. That massively skews the results, and in a predictable way. (Cities are always more educated.)

Look, if you don't believe me, print out the article, and take it to someone with a strong background statistics. They'll tell you all the same things.

This "study" is massively flawed.
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Yes, I'm sure it's because we're self-centered. Come on, man. We've got Fox News. They would *love* this kind of thing -- any positive news about anything remotely religious, and they're all over it. Anti-Catholic? Whatever -- our beloved JFK was Catholic.

Anyway, who in the UK picked it up? Was it in The Economist (UK), International Harald Tribute (France), The Age (Australia)? Any legitimate news source?
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It's a study when they compare the results of the survey to national data.
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Anyway, we're (Americans) not all bad. And we love our JFK, and we generally aren't interested in dead presidents and their womanizing. If we're going to go after historical figures for personal habits, Thomas Jefferson would be at the top of the list. FYI, a front-runner for the Presidency in 08 is Barak Obama, a Catholic.

Answer 3

in a population of people that is 90 percent Christain and churchgoers, you come up with this statistic how..

if you have 100 people and 90 of them are churchgoers and
30 of them are college graduated that makes 1 in 3.

you take the other 10 people.you have 1 college graduate.

and the study (still waiting for a source on that by the way) will almost definatly have taken people in their thirties that are working middle class jobs...

equalise the study. take 10,000 churchgoers.
and then take 10,000 non churchgoers, that are all in the same income bracket, and see what it shows you.

and then look further into what they are educated in. and if they are actually useing their education.

Answer 4

Hmm....where is Venice again? Italy right? What's in Italy? Yeah....I rest my case. I don't buy polls or surveys that are designed to make a group of people seem smarter if they subscribe to a certain idea.

Going to church only proves you can drive to a building on a certain day and sit in a seat and listen to some dude wax poetic about something that may or may not have happened.

I've been to church. In my experience, most people are too busy gossiping and trying to get your money to worry about higher education. That's just MY experience. I don't live in Venice so maybe that's why.

Answer 5

some parts of europe have very high percentages of people that attend church, much higher than the rest of the world.

I have 2 points to make, what are the proportions in the rest of the world?

Remember that if 1 in 3 graduates go to church, double that number don't.

I just thought of another factor, what percentage of the population are graduates? it could still mean that they are outnumbered by nongraduates

Answer 6

No I don't. I know some non churchgoers who are definitely more educated then the president of America.